For the entirety that this website has been online again as a personal blog there’s been a small pencil drawing of a dragon in the bottom right corner. It’s right down there, literally right now. Go look. It’s “me”, but I didn’t draw it. So, who did? Where did it come from?
It was actually drawn by one of my exes, though I’m not sure if “ex” is even an applicable term here because as close as we were it was still a long distance relationship over the internet and we’d never met each other in person. If I had to ballpark when that drawing was made for me it would have to be a significant amount of time ago because the character is remarkably masculine-looking… meaning I hadn’t yet come to the realization that the dragon I used to represent me may have been something “more than man” (further reading: The Dragon with No Name). I have a vague recollection of going out of my way to create a custom background for my Xbox 360 system that used this very artwork and that was something you could only do with the “NXE” dashboard which existed between 2008 and 2010. My gut is telling me the drawing is probably from 2009; it’s almost 20 years old.
It’s hard to say where exactly I met my ex as he and I existed in multiple spaces at the same time and probably unintentionally crossed paths many times. He had an account on Herpy, but I don’t remember when he joined the website and whether or not him knowing me from elsewhere influenced his decision to join. Again, going with my gut, he probably stumbled upon me on Yiffstar because 2009 was something of a big year for me and I was arguably at the top of whatever “game” I had back then (further reading: My Fifteen Minutes at Further Confusion).
We bonded over our mutual affinity for everything dragon-related. I have fond memories of staying up very late on nights where neither of us had class the next day and we’d alternate between gushing over draconic characters we thought were attractive and playfully roleplaying with one another as our avatars, which of course were also dragons. I remember the first time I’d ever heard his voice was a crunchy .WAV file he sent to me over MSN Messenger showing me how to pronounce his name correctly. That year we texted each other on Christmas morning and exchanged our best wishes. Somewhere in that window of time he drew this pencil sketch of my dragon, scanned it, and sent the file to me.
He drew a lot of things for me in the period we knew each other. He was a very talented artist. “Very” almost seems like an understatement; I don’t want to make it seem like I’m putting the guy on a pedestal or anything like that but he was genuinely very talented both with physical media as well as creating digital art. I, on the other hand, was a very talented writer. It wasn’t intentional, but I guess there were inklings there of a potential “power couple” where I could write up something stellar and he’d be able to provide the illustrations to enhance it. We actually did set out to try that, too. The manuscript that I mentioned in the Further Confusion journal? The one that a publisher wanted from me sight unseen? This was to be that project. Ultimately, it was destined to never see the light of day.
Our relationship lasted perhaps a year, give or take a month or two. As we continued to get to know each other better he developed a case of cold feet in regards to coming out to his extremely traditional family. Naturally I had the same worries on my own side of the equation but that was a conversation I wasn’t really fretting about at the time. One day he just got really worried about it though and ultimately decided that he didn’t want to put his family in a twist by revealing to them that he was interested in men.
So he broke up with me.
In hindsight I guess it really doesn’t matter because with the wisdom of age I now know that young love is fleeting (and, specific to the era we live in today, long distance relationships over the internet are kind of a farce to begin with), but as it goes in the moment it was everything to me. Naturally. I felt truly hurt that I thought what I had with him was genuine and meaningful. Maybe it was, maybe breaking things off with me was a conversation he was also dreading to have. I don’t want to discredit the things he was probably struggling with. I guess the way I saw it at the time was that I acknowledged that both conversations were going to be painful no matter what, and I was the one that was the least painful of the two.
He stuck around in the communities we were in. Rubbed elbows with other people. He went on to have a fairly respectable body of work in the fandom, and I wasn’t part of it anymore. We came from the same little circle of friends so we were aware of each other’s presence, but we didn’t speak anymore. We went from staying up ’til sunrise nuzzling and kissing each other over chat to never, ever, speaking again.
The last time I ever spoke to him was in 2016. I along with some mutual friends and a couple of other guys I hadn’t met before took a trip across the country to spend a week at his place. He’d bought a house, a really nice place, and somehow plans were made to spend the Christmas holiday there. I wasn’t invited directly, one of the people I traveled with asked if I’d like to come along. Maybe he’d asked my ex if he’d mind if I tagged along, I don’t actually know. In the decade that has followed I’ve never bothered to ask. To this day I’m not sure why I agreed to go on the trip. Maybe I just wanted to spend some time with the other guys I did know who were also going. A bigger part of me just doesn’t want to acknowledge the elephant in the room that perhaps I’d finally get to have some closure on what had happened over half a decade prior.
Christmas. Seems to come up on this blog more often than I’d like it to. In 2009 my ex and I texted each other on that day and shared with one another our love and what we hoped to have in the future. That year I bought him a small papier-mâché dragon ornament with the intent to give it to him in person when we finally got to meet each other. I still had that ornament tossed aside into the back of one of the drawers of my computer desk; I can’t even say it was “forgotten” because I knew exactly where it was this entire time. Seven Christmasses later that ornament would finally make the journey it was destined to have.
We arrived to his home on the 23rd. On Christmas Eve we went out to have dinner at a ridiculously expensive authentic Chinese restaurant, the kind of place where they don’t even print the prices of things on the menu because “if you have to ask that means you can’t afford it”. He footed the entire bill. Six people, including him. I don’t think it was a flex, he was just being generous. After all, he was on much better terms with literally everyone else who was visiting; I was just “there”. He wasn’t rude to me though, but we did talk like we were strangers to one another. He was someone who seven years prior I’d yearn to hold at night and be upset that I couldn’t do it, genuinely so. Like I said, young love is fleeting and I understand that now but I was 20/21 years old at the time and I really did think that was the single most important thing in my life. Now, I was almost 30.
On Christmas Day we played some board games with each other. One of my friends, the one who’d invited me to come along on the trip, brought his Cards Against Humanities set and to commemorate the occasion we filled in a couple of the blank cards that he had with some shared inside jokes. At the urging of my peers I jotted down one of the creatures from the story that my ex and I failed to bring to fruition. They laughed. I did too, but I didn’t mean it.
That night when everyone was getting ready for bed I approached my ex. I asked if he and I could talk for a little bit by ourselves. We went back to his bedroom, and I brought with me the ornament I’d purchased for him all those years ago. It was still tucked into the same little box I’d found for it and scrawled his name onto so I wouldn’t forget what was in it. I handed it to him, told him what it was, and why it was important to me not just then but also still to that day. He opened the box, looked at the trinket, and seemed unmoved by it. He was appreciative of the gesture, but I understand that it meant absolutely nothing. We hugged, something that years prior I wanted to experience more than anything else in the world, and it didn’t register to me at all.
I shared a guest bedroom with one of the guys I hadn’t met until going on the trip. I laid on the portable air mattress we’d blown up facing away from the rest of the room. I wasn’t crying but I was in that weird limbo state where you’re about to, where your face feels itchy and hot and your muscles kind of twitch like you’re about to sneeze or something. Pardon the melodramatic “sixteen year old on Livejournal who thinks they have it all figured out” tone, but in that moment I felt absolutely every emotion there was to feel, and also exactly none of them at all. The only reason I didn’t burst into tears is because one of the other guys popped his head in to say goodnight and for some reason the guy I was sharing the room with snapped his head around and asked why he just blurted out a racial slur. I do not know how you can mishear the word “goodnight” as anything approaching racist but he swears he did and that single moment of levity let me settle on an emotion; I started laughing uncontrollably, and they joined in.
The next day, and the rest of the trip, went on like nothing had happened. We left on the 27th and I traveled back with the guy’s I’d ridden with and we all went our separate ways from there. I’m still in touch with the person who invited me on the trip of course, and his partner as well, but my ex and I haven’t exchanged a single message in the decade that it’s been. He changed up his identity within the fandom and reinvented himself as a purely digital artist with a much more monstrous-looking fursona and maintained that image for a while before bowing out of the community entirely. He’d already found significant personal success elsewhere all the way back in 2016, and he very obviously came from a privileged background to start with, so I guess in some form or another he got whatever it was he wanted out of his time with the furry fandom and it was time to move on.
When I was at his house I picked up one of his business cards that he had a stack of haphazardly sitting on his kitchen countertop. It was one for his actual career, not a furry artist card. I’ve looked at it a couple of times in the years that have passed and it’s strange to look at the picture of him on it and feel exactly nothing. Other than the digital files of the things he made for me this is the only tangible thing I have that reminds me of him.
Sometimes I wonder where he is. I wonder if he’s ever thought about the purple dragon he fell in love with almost 20 years ago. I wonder if he misses me. In a roundabout and complicated way, I miss him. I hope he is well.
Until next time.
